That's fair. But academia is often full of BS, pardon the language, and so the radar needs to be cranked up. With, say, Medium articles, one can skim if it's good or not within seconds. Academic papers can take hours, if not weeks to discover if it's complete BS or whether I'm just not smart enough, and so I can only go off minor cues.

It's generally better to read hard things. They're hard because they have a lot of information density or a lot of gaps. But that also makes people confuse poor readability for quality. Something that has no content tries to be hard to read by stuffing it full of gobbledygook. Whereas something that is trying to communicate an idea often goes through a few revisions trying to simplify the idea. If you have great ideas, you want the user to be expending their brainpower trying to comprehend the idea, not translating it into simple English. (exception is using jargon that's common to people at the right level)